The way I see it hwbot.org is the best competition platform there is for the consumer PC hardware industry, despite its shortcomings like this thread highlights.
If you distill all the complaints and compliments, the bottom line is that most everyone competing is doing this for fun - even the people getting the ES chips are doing it because they like playing with hardware. The people complaining are more worried about their boints as they compare to someone else's than they should be, and they are losing sight of the fact this is fun even if the playing field isn't 100% level with scientific accuracy.
I voted for option 1 because in the end the boints are just numbers systematically assigned to give us something to compare eachother with and have more fun. If you want to compete with people at the top, you have to play the game a certain way and position yourselves the way those individuals have, simple as that... If you don't want to play the game that way, there are many other ways you can compete on hwbot and still have a lot of fun.
I definitely see the value in looking at ways to improve and standardize better, but I think massman and richbastard have struck a pretty good balance with the way things currently are. There will always be griefers regarding the details, but the way submissions have grown and subzero has exploded... That's a testament to the fact these guys are doing a lot of things right here and a lot of people are enjoying it. And to the griefers - if you guys motivate people to look for better solutions, in the long run you are helping move things forward too and thats great. Its good to better understand the perceptions people have and find whats important - if hwbot doesn't do it, someone else might. In the end tho, I think the right ingredients are here and they'll keep improving in the future as they have in the past.
So Props from Overclockers.com - I may not be an active bencher, but I have a lot of fun keeping track team OC Forums and watching them compete against the other teams and members around them. Thanks for the great platform to do it upon hwbot!
). The idea was for him and others with connections to have a platform to show thier stuff, whithout activly competing for rank. This was implemented via the "Do NOT participate in hwbot rankings" option.
